Sonoma Raceway marks the final NASCAR Cup Series race of the 2024 season that will air on the FOX family of networks. Given that this is the last Cup race in this TV contract, FOX was clearly in a reminiscing mood all weekend.
During NASCAR RaceDay, the main feature of the show saw Jamie Little interviewing Austin Cindric. Naturally, the topics centered around his somewhat surprising victory at World Wide Technology Raceway. That doesn’t really shock me since he hadn’t won in more than two years and didn’t seem like he was anywhere close to doing so.
My main takeaway from the piece is that the past couple of years have been rather trying for Cindric. He’s struggled on track and he had been taking it rather hard. He’s still having fun racing even if it seems like he’s had “three rookie seasons.”
One of the main topics of discussion during FOX Sports’ portion of the season has been production, or more specifically, the direction of the broadcast production. Chuck McDonald took over as head producer for FOX NASCAR at the beginning of last season. Since then, there has been a backslide in production strategies.
When he first came on, one of the things that McDonald (and by extension, FOX) insisted on was frontloading commercial breaks. That strategy backfired, unfortunately.
More recently, we’ve had issues when things happen simply because the production fails to keep up. We had another example of that in the opening laps Sunday (June 9) when Denny Hamlin blew his engine.
Our Spanish-language viewers actually have it worse.
It appears that the Spanish-language commentators are not on-site. As a result, they are completely dependent on whatever FOX Sports provides, like us at home. It’s not good, dudes.
Admittedly, I know this because of a DVR error. Even when I’m home to watch races live, I DVR the race so that I can go back and re-watch certain aspects of the broadcast for this column. In this case, I discovered Monday that I accidentally DVR’d the FOX Deportes broadcast of the race instead of the English-language broadcast. I didn’t even realize that I get FOX Deportes prior to this (I thought it was part of an international tier that I don’t subscribe to). If I actually spoke Spanish, I would be able to speak to this situation better.
It’s actually this very situation that I fear for next year. As you know, the NASCAR…
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